Chamber and committees

A point that was made in the very first submission from the Scottish Government, on 8 June 2021, was that, in some public bodies—the boards of the national park authorities were cited as an example—there is a requirement that some members be local residents. Therefore, that is not a wild or radical idea. It is a concept that is already present in the law, which is why I mention it.

Should there be a requirement that a certain number of board members should be resident in the islands and/or should extra weighting be given to residency in the decision about selection, for which a number of criteria to do with competencies will routinely be fixed? It seems to me that there should be a residency weighting so that the discrimination against people from the islands that exists in the way in which the system works at the moment, which we heard about from Naomi Bremner, in particular, although Rona MacKay also spoke about it, can be counteracted. There could be a 20 or 30 per cent weighting in favour of people from the islands for any board or other significant appointment, or a senior managerial appointment.

Are those ideas that the petitioners feel that it would be sensible for us to pursue? I was with the Ethical Standards Commissioner, who, I think, is responsible for public appointments. That is referred to in more detail in the submission of 8 June 2021, so I will park that.

Naomi Bremner mentioned her absurd experience of not being able to attend for interview, as that would have taken up three days of her life and would have involved her incurring expenses that she would not have got back. It is no wonder that she did not want to go.

Naomi, if you had the ability to participate by video call, in the way that you are doing at the moment, and there was a weighting in favour of you, as an island resident, would that help to counteract the problem that we have been kicking around to no effect for two and a half years?

I am broadly supportive of the petitioner’s aims. I should say that I do not think that I am part of a cabal. Cabals operate in secret, and we have not been doing that. [Laughter.] However, Nairn is still waiting for its bypass and I see the arguments about the practical and significant economic benefits of the bypass to Maybole, so I take that into account.

Mr Whittle, Emma Harper and, I believe, Finlay Carson are pursuing this matter with others. Although I come from the opposite end of Scotland, I think that the rural transport network really needs far more attention, not only in the Highlands but in the south-west of Scotland, and Mr Whittle expressed the feelings of frustration of people down there. They feel forgotten, as do the citizens of Nairn. Frankly, it is a rural issue that affects the whole of Scotland, and perhaps more resources—more cash from the capital budget—needs to be devoted to building roads, rather than some other schemes that I had probably better not mention. I suggest that we write to the Minister for Transport to pursue those points.

I noticed that the previous cabinet secretary with responsibility for transport urged us to close the petition. I wonder whether ministers should urge us to close petitions. I wonder whether that is for Parliament to do.

However, setting that aside for the moment, we could write to the Minister for Transport to seek an update on when the STPR2 delivery plan will be published and whether the delivery plan will set out timescales for the delivery of specific recommendations and information about the Scottish Government’s approach to prioritising those recommendations and, secondly, to ask whether the Scottish Government will redirect any STPR2 savings that arise from UK Government funding from the A75 to accelerate improvements on the A77.

The petitioner has been remarkably persistent in having campaigned on issues relating to mental health, particularly on treatment without consent, for 20 years, as I understand it. The issues are by no means straightforward.

There is a case for keeping the petition open. The reason is that, although we have a lengthy response from the Scottish Government in annex C of paper CPPP/S6/23/19/8, which goes into the high-level priorities for inclusion in a reform programme, if one looks at the various components of that—there are seven—every one is at an extremely early stage. The words used are “work towards”, “consider opportunities” and “early priority”—that kind of language. That is no criticism, because all the issues are complicated, but the petitioner is entitled to get a bit more than that, and the issues that he raises are important.

We should write to the Scottish Government to seek an updated view on the petition in light of its response to the Scottish mental health law review, and to ask when its consultation on the adults with incapacity law reform will take place and how the petitioner can engage with that.

The Government accepts that the law in relation to adults with incapacity needs attention. It uses the phrase “addressing long-standing gaps”, so it admits that there is a problem. The petitioner is entitled to know when it will deal with the problem, what the timescale is and how he and others can engage with the process.

I am struck by the fact that the petition was lodged on 24 March 2021, which is two and a half years ago, and that, since then, we have had no less than four ministerial submissions, most of them fairly short.

I return to the arguments that the three petitioners advanced in their earlier submission. They made four specific suggestions. In brief, those were

“Reserving a place on the selection panel for the Chair of HIAL”,

“Assigning three of the seats on the HIAL board to people who live in the communities”,

retaining one of those seats

“for a co-opted member from the HITRANS/ZetTrans Board”

and allocating a place on the board to at least one council out of Western Isles Council, Orkney Islands Council and Shetland Islands Council.

I mention that in order to set out a thesis. I never wish to be unfair to any Government minister, but what surprises me is that, in the four responses that we have had from ministers, I cannot find a specific answer on any of those suggestions. I find that very disappointing and I would be inclined to pursue it. To enable us to pursue that in the best way, I would like to know whether the petitioners feel frustrated. They have put forward specific suggestions about how things could be improved, but here we are, two and a half years later, and we do not appear to have had an explicit, clear, direct answer on any of them. That seems to me to be, at the very best, somewhat unsatisfactory.

I wonder whether we could add to the content of the letter to the Government as described by Mr Torrance a request that the Government comment specifically on the statistic to which the convener alluded, which shows that access to a defibrillator increases substantially a person’s chances of survival. In addition, I might have missed this in the papers—there is a lot of data in the British Heart Foundation’s submission—but I wonder whether it is possible to identify how many people’s lives have been saved as a result of the increased protect and survive capability that defibrillators provide. Rather than having a theoretical statistical percentage, it would be very interesting to find out how many people’s lives have been saved as a result of defibrillators. I think that that would be useful data to access—if, of course, the British Heart Foundation has it. We can ascertain whether it does by asking it that question.

I am just trying to get to the root of your views and also to what you think should happen, so that we can consider matters in the light of that.

Thank you, convener, and good morning to our witnesses. Thank you for appearing. As you have alluded to, the committee was keen to give you the opportunity and to hear what you have to say.

You might have already answered my question, Dr Blackburn, but what is the aim of the petition? What would you like to see happening? You have made your views clear, and I am grateful for that, but I am curious to know what you would like to happen and what in particular you would like to see changed.

I am obviously not going to mention any particular cases, but there may be instances of a rape suspect self-identifying as a trans woman. Many people—including me, although this is my personal view—might think that that person is frankly at it and is a bad actor. Given that that is happening in—happily—a very few instances, what is your view about how the gender identity of the suspects in those cases should be recorded? It is presumably your view that those are men and should be recorded as male. Is that it?

I have listened to what you said and I am grateful for the explanation that you have given. Is your concern not so much about the precise or dry technical rules about how sex should be recorded but about the fact that there have, in recent times, been cases of men carrying out rape and self-identifying as women so that, instead of recognising them as men, the state takes a wishy-washy, mealy-mouthed approach and cannot spit out that those people are, in fact, men? Is that really your concern? Rather than the issue of the recording of statistics, is this not more about an ethical or political view that you have? We have to consider where we go and what we do with the petition, if anything.

I do not mean in any way to criticise the view that you take, which I probably share, if I have understood the views that you have expressed this morning, but it seems to me that what you really want is for society to take the very clear approach that a male rapist is a male rapist, that rapists are men and that that is that, and that men who—as you see it—pretend to be women are at it. If that is your view, is that not more a matter of politics than of the recording of statistics? Many members of the public would say that it is pretty obvious that all rapists are men and that we all know that already, and that, if they identify as women, that is a matter of self-identification but does not change their biological sex.

I guess that the background to that view is the feeling that some individuals might seek to be housed in female prisons. In that sense, the motive for professing female gender is one that most people would regard as bogus. That said, I take the distinction that has been made.

I have just one more question for the witnesses, which is this: what would you like to happen next? You have already said that ethical leadership is what you require from the Government, the police, those who record statistics and so on, but are there any more specific things that you would like to be done in response to your petition?